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Google Analytics’ Social Media Hub

Date posted: December 20, 2011

We’ve often discussed the increasing importance of both Google Analytics and a comprehensive social media plan (that incorporates your content and marketing messages across a number of different platforms), so it’s nice to see that Google Analytics has now made it easier to combine the two.

Google recently announced a social data hub, which is on open web standards such as ActivityStreams and PubsubHubbub. This new social data hub is an effort to put all the social media activities in one single place. Google has been inviting social networks and platforms to integrate their activity streams with Google Analytics, which will let users:

Discover off-site engagement

Optimize their engagement within each social community

Measure the impact of each social channel and its associated digital investment

And more

A number of sites have already opted in. These include: Delicious, Digg, Diigo, Gigya, LiveFyre, ReadItLater, Reddit, TypePad, Vkontakte, and of course, Google+, Blogger and Google Groups. How long before some of the other big social media names give in (looking at you Facebook and Twitter)?

What do you think about Google Analytics’ social media hub? Do you think it’s something that your school will find useful?

Philippe Taza
As a certified Digital Analyst, Philippe Taza founded and created Higher Education Marketing, providing Internet marketing solutions for education institutions, such as K-12 schools, universities, and community colleges. In all, he has been working in the education market since 2001, specializing in Google Analytics, Education Lead Generation, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and Pay Per Click Marketing, among many other education marketing tactics and tools.